Given the Dell Precision T1650 is capable of supporting the fastest quad core processors available (with the Ivy Bridge Xeons even eclipsing their desktop brethren in raw clock speed), it's reasonable to expect it will do well in most of our benchmarks. At the same time, PCMark probably won't be as kind to the T1650's lack of SSD; the difference will be made up in the CPU-centric benchmarks later on.

It's definitely fast, though, and it shows an appreciable gain over last generation's Precision T1600 workstation. Note that the starting price of that system was $100 more than the T1650's, while that review configuration's CPU was basically maxed out and still $400 short of where we are with the T1650. Futuremark is going to render the difference between the two systems as efficiently as our more heavily CPU-based benchmarks will, though.

Single-threaded performance is as high as we've ever seen; it takes an awful lot of CPU to catch up to the Xeon E3-1280 v2 in our review unit. The E3-1280 v2 is as much as 13% faster than its predecessor and you'll see it draws less power in the process. At this point you really need to add cores to match the new Xeon's performance.

Good machine, the Ivy-bridge goodness allows for a boost in performance.

But as a few pointed out, ECC is a must for a CAD workstation and for some critical work.It slightly impacts performance.On our side, we still opted for several 3D workstations without it as we wanted to increase productivity with overclocking.

I am just surprised by some comments, it's obvious that 2700 USD for a box is expensive, but for a Xeon+quadro 2000 set-up and all the ISV certification behind, that's quite in line and you don't buy this kind of stuff for general ledger work...

One point Coming standard is also the 3 years on-site warranty (at least from our side of the world), which is nice to have from a business point of view.

I was expecting that Dell would have update the flow of their machine but it appears that either the flow was already great, either price reduction was too aggressive on that one.I still prefer the SFF in IBM and HP's line, they better fit my vision of small CAD box. :)Reply

These machines are a total waste of money. I have a T7600, cost $5500. The absurdly expensive processor in these things suck for 3D modeling. They don't offer a i7 option. I bought $800 pc from Micro Center with a solidstate and i7, put a the same graphics card in it which cost $400 and it runs circles around my T7600. I build it for a co-worker when his office machine died. I felt like a dumbass after that. The key 3d modeling with any type of engineering software is, the programs only support 1 processor. The, the i7 processors are a steal on every level even rendering were the it utilizes all cores. On a side note, I own a M6600 with an i7 for personal use and it is smoking fast, couldn't be happier with it.Reply